Lightning Talk on data.table

Given to the useR group on November 4th 2013.

The data.table R package is a drop in replacement for R data frames. It’s primary benefit is that, by working with sorted data, many common operations can be drastically sped up.

On November 4th, 2013 I gave a 10-minute lightning talk to the Pittsburgh userR Group going through some of the basic syntax, and showing an example of the potential speedups. The slides can be found here:

Additionally, these slides were produced with Beamer and all the R code you see is embedded and runnable in the document using Sweave. If you want download the source for the file and play around with the code inside, it is available here:

Additional Resources

The official documentation for data.table is fairly complete. I’ve included a number of links below. Before reading the full package documentation, the fastest way to get started is with the official quick introduction. The complete documentation provides very in depth explanations of each argument, interface and method, it’s only useful if you know what you’re looking for. The F.A.Q. page takes an approach that tries to answer questions that would occur during regular use of the package.